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"like a rolling thing before the whirlwind." Satan therefore, receive a temporary power to convulse our globe, and what fearful "earthquakes" will ensue ? Let the ripening harvest be delivered up to his disposal, and "famine" will stalk abroad in forms never before witnessed; while the "pestilence" in his fierce, malignant hand, will transform the healthiest population into heaps of loathsome corruption.

God can arm his spiritual creatures with a terrible power over mortal life. The destroying angel who smote the Egyptians, is an instance of the rapid movement with which a multitude may be mown down; and it is remarkable also in being not a promiscuous slaughter, like that of Sennacherib's army, but a careful selection made from every family in every house. An angel, too, smote the people of Israel when David had numbered them, the description of whose proceedings is awfully grand. 1 Sam. xxiv. 26. And in the

next verse we are told, "David saw the angel that smote the people;" therefore to resolve it, as some attempt to do, into a figurative mode of expression, is unwarrantable: it was a real angel of God; and even such was Satan before he fell; and what a holy angel can do by a divine command, that can the foul apostate also do by divine permission.

But a far more perilous feature of these predicted times of trial, is the seduction to be practised. Satan understands the varieties of the human character; he knows there are many whom open persecution would rouse rather than intimidate, and for them, and for God's true people, he has snares in reserve. He can

make his own murderous acts appear as the righteous judgment of the Most High. In the Revelation we are told, that the Papal beast "doeth great wonders, so that he maketh fire to come down from heaven on the earth in the sight of men,” Rev. xiii. 13; and that he deceiveth them that dwell on the earth, by means of those miracles which he hath power to do. We may naturally conclude, that his object is to assume divine authority for what he does, by bringing the destructive element down, as when the Lord rained fire and brimstone upon the cities of the plain; for even so he wrought to terrify Job, while he stripped him of his possessions.

Domestic treachery, arming kindred hands, is also predicted-Luke xxiv. 16; so that a man's foes shall be "they of his own household." This is a very ancient device of Satan: he first rendered Eve the deadliest foe of her husband and of her whole posterity, by leading her to transgress: he then guided the hand of the first man born into the world to slay his brother: and history, sacred and profane, is but a record of his successful plots against the peace of families and of kingdoms, by means of every species of treachery. Here, as of old, he will make his delusions avail to draw the deluded into all cruelty and bloodshed. His terrible craft is able to persuade a man that falsehood is truth, and that in slaying the righteous, "he doeth God service;" hence the snare against which the Lord most fully and emphatically warned his first disciples, and against which he also warns us-false Christs, and false prophets. We know that just previous to the destruc

tion of Jerusalem, when, no doubt, Satan hoped to involve the Christians in the general ruin, several deceivers assumed the name of Christ, and drew away many after them: it is plain that in some way, these pretensions will again be put forth; and we have reason to look steadily at that which is already written, lest any seeming revelation, contradictory to what is given to be our guide unto the end of the world, should be contrived, to deceive, if it were possible, the very elect. The general expectation, prevailing more and more throughout the church, of our Lord's promised coming, will doubtless furnish the cunning adversary with additional means of annoyance and destruction. Already, and for centuries past, has he proclaimed, "Behold! he is in the secret chambers!" to the eternal loss of unnumbered souls who, believing the lie, have worshiped an idol enclosed in a box, upon the Popish altars; deifying the senseless paste in Christ's stead, and perishing in their sin. Literally and distinctly is a "false Christ" held forth for public worship, by the "false prophets" of Rome, to this day; and no one is justified in questioning the express fulfilment, to the letter, of all that our Lord has foreshown. Here, too, there is warrant enough in the Old Testament to satisfy the most incredulous. When the king of Israel was to be enticed to battle at Ramoth Gilead, where he fell, a "lying spirit" possessed the whole company of his prophets, so that they all predicted his success, in the name of the Lord. He, "who was a liar from the beginning," put into their mouths this unauthorized prediction; even as he tempted the old prophet of

Bethel to deceive the man of God who came out of Judah and in like manner the Jewish people were continually transgressing through the perfidious words of their ungodly teachers, saying, "Peace, peace,' where there was no peace. There seems to be a prevailing belief among Christians, that the enmity of the last day will break forth in the form of open, outrageous infidel defiance of God and his Christ; and so it probably will to a great extent: but surely not exclusively so: Satan will not wholly give up his old craft of forging God's name and authority for deeds most desperately subversive of His laws, and insulting to His majesty. "That old serpent" retains the designation, and, no doubt, the deep, subtle plausibility which it implies, to the very moment when an elect angel lays hold on him, and binds him, and shuts and seals him up, "that he should deceive the nations no more, till the thousand years should be fulfilled." Rev. xx. 3. And again, "When the thousand years are expired, Satan shall be loosed out of his prison, and shall go out to deceive the nations which are in the four quarters of the earth," (verses 7, 8.) Such considerations would render us more watchful against forms of error, creeping with serpent-like guile into the Church itself, and stealing on the unguarded points of the citadel, where, as no open enemy is descried, no adequate defence is prepared.

The extraordinary movement that, some ten or twelve years since excited universal attention, when the Scotch Church in London was considered to be the scene of miraculous manifestations of divine power,

wore very much the aspect of a preparatory manœuvre of the enemy. Some things took place that it is very hard to account for, without admitting the aid of a supernatural power; and to suppose that power to have been of God is impossible, when we remember with what an awful heresy it was connected. That party set up indeed a "false Christ"a Christ compounded of Popish and Socinian errors, a blasphemous counterfeit of Him who was holy, harmless, undefiled, and separate from sinners. The manner of bringing in this perilous deceit, was exceedingly like what the Scripture leads us to expect of Satan's latter-day devices; and it is remarkable, that just as the Lord placed an evident barrier to stay the farther spread of this delusion, another masked battery against the truth of Christ's gospel, subversive, at once, of His atoning and His mediatorial all-sufficiency, was opened at Oxford, and has worked, and is working to the same end with the Irvingite heresy, only with a different kind of assumption. In the former attempt, the gospel was to be set aside by a new revelation, accompanied with attesting signs and wonders, as from the hand of its Almighty Author: under the latter system, men claim a power, in virtue of the commission delivered to the apostles, of new modeling all things: thinking to "change times and laws," (Dan. vii. 25,) after the manner, and on the same ground as the Papacy, that convicted child of the devil: and into which the whole thing will probably soon resolve itself, in the face of all men. These small droppings are at once a potent and a sample of the coming shower; and we shall do well so to